


A Cold Climate

by rabbitfurcoat



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 03:18:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/669671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbitfurcoat/pseuds/rabbitfurcoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa is the girl on the dying horse, a terrible storm keeps Stannis at the Wall, and a violent outbreak of grey plague claims Selyse and Shireen. But even kings without thrones need heirs and apparently all sides in the Northern war need Stark brides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. King of the Cold

**Author's Note:**

> This is slow-moving and narrowly-focused and somewhat porny, and the first chapter doesn’t give a lot of context so a brief summary will help. Sansa was the girl on the dying horse, fleeing from the Eyrie to the Wall. A terrible storm—and the approach of the Others—keep Stannis at the Wall and completely stall the war for the North. Melisandre has embraced Jon as Azor Ahai and Stannis has become disillusioned with her Red God, particularly after Shireen’s greyscale triggered some kind of deadly epidemic at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. (I think this is definitely a canon possibility: “One must not put [an infected little girl] on the stage if no one is thinking of [having her spread plague and disease],” to, um, paraphrase Chekhov.) Left without a heir and wife after Shireen and Selyse’s deaths and hoping to counter Ramsay Bolton’s claim to Winterfell through “Arya”, Stannis has reluctantly married Sansa. They remain at Castle Black as the North grows colder. This is all threaded into the story later and is mostly just background/justification for putting these two people together at the Wall, but it’s here for the sake of clarity. 
> 
> Sansa’s wildling maids are the Kingsblood daughters Selyse married off to Axell Florent and two of her knights in ADWD. They were never married here: they’ve been given names instead! 
> 
> I don’t think this ship is at all probable or particularly romantic or even properly a ship but dire dystopian sex is fun. Sansa is about sixteen or seventeen here, because that makes me feel better and I always thought GRRM made his characters unrealistically young.

“It is not easy to make love in a cold climate…The 'never the time and the place' motif is not made enough of in novels [or songs].” – Orwell, _Keep the Aspidistra Flying_

(and with obvious debt to Nancy Mitford)

I: King of the Cold

It was the cold that woke her, as always, winding under her furs and clawing up her legs, stiffening her fingers and hair. She was wound around a cold hollow in the mattress, as always, furs tucked over her head and under her feet, and, as always, her fire had gone out in the night. She’d inherited a trio of flame-haired wilding princesses from Selyse—good, brave girls, more used to striking fires in the wilderness than on a lady’s hearth—but lately even they had been pale and short-tempered in the cold, their hair burned down to cinders and pushed under hoods, and Sansa hated to pull them from their warms beds in the night to check her fire. They were helpful enough, piling pelts and heated stones on her mattress and rubbing the feeling back into her hands and feet when her blood froze at her joints. Sansa felt guilty, knowing how cold they were too, seeing how they sniveled and shivered, how they tried not to let her see them running their hands under their noses and sucking their icy fingers into their mouths.

She fancied she looked like she could have been their fourth sister, now that the brown dye had faded from her hair, now that they huddled in identical dark hoods and her furs were as tattered as theirs. She imagined that sometimes, when the four of them sat sewing in her solar, when their fingers were all stiffened into thumbs and their stitches wide and wavering and Sansa had to prick her fingers to make sure they still felt. _We’re wilding princesses_ , _Kingsblood daughters, and not one of us is a queen_. Seylse had fancied these girls princesses—their father fancied it too—and tried to make them into ladies-in-waiting and lords’ wives. But Selyse had died and necessity had made them _her_ maids and Sansa just wanted them to be sisters. She’d been born surrounded by servants but here, where the cold was like a flaying knife and the soup as thin above the salt as below—here she didn’t feel comfortable being waited on while others froze.

The cold was different here at the Wall, sharper and unrelenting.  It wasn’t like the cold at Winterfell when she was little and the snows piled as high as the curtain wall or even the cold on the endless ride north, when her breath would freeze a slick of ice under her nose and she thought her horse would die beneath her. This wasn’t a numbing of toes or noses. This was a burning creeping in from the fingers—and a knife through the ribs with each breath. She could never get warm here, no matter how close she sat to the fire or how many skins she draped on her bed.

There’d been some heat last night, though, and she flushed to think of it. Her husband had left in the night to sleep in his own chambers, of course (he stayed until she fell asleep now, but only because she’d protested that his leaving made her feel like a whore—as if he had ever bedded a whore) but they’d done their duty well and his hands and his chest had been warm, even if his eyes weren’t. She even swore he’d gritted her name into her hair when he spent and when he rolled off her, she followed, burrowing her head into his chest and tangling up their legs. For once he didn’t protest. “I’ll get you a rag,” Stannis had said stiffly, and she’d squirmed against the itch of his seed dried on her leg, but it was too cold and the wash basin would be iced over and she’d begged him to stay close. _I like it_ , she’d thought, only half horrified at herself. _I like the ends of your pleasure sticky between my thighs. I want to press you close and damn you with how much you want me, how wonderful I made you feel_.

She liked him between her legs, breathing ragged in her ear, teasing at ridge of pleasure she could never quite cross. She’d nestled closer to him, blood still thrumming at her groin, unsatisfied, and rocked her hips half-consciously against him. He was always warmest right after, warm and drowsy before the guilt crept in and his teeth began to grind, and he’d awkwardly draped his arm over her hip, stiff like he was afraid he’d do it wrong. But when her forehead knocked against his chin she thought maybe he’d kissed her hair. Even he couldn’t deny himself the heat of a shared bed on such a night, it seemed.

She hadn’t woken when he left—she never did—and now his side of the bed was chilled through. He’d tucked all the furs and blankets around her before he left.  She rose slowly, the last warmth of sleep seeping from her legs, and walked hunched to the hearth, a bear pelt wrapped around her shoulders. The cold had frozen her muscles and her knees crunched like cracking ice when she bent to relight the fire, hands clumsy on the steel and flint. She couldn’t blame the cold, though, for the way her head spun and bile rose to the back of her throat when she stood or for the way she heaved up last night’s supper onto the rushes when she caught sight of its remains, glistening with ice on the table. There had been hard black bread and leek soup with a slime of grease at the top and a slime of meat at the bottom and she’d hardly eaten any of it, but the memory of its taste but her stomach churn and she felt like she vomited forever.

Suddenly one of the red-haired maids was beside her, pulling back her hair and rubbing her back and making soft, snuffling noises into her ear. Finally she sat back, dizzy and gulping, and stared at the sick on the floor.

“I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t think the food agrees with me much.” This had been the third time in a week she’d spilled her supper on these hearthstones and she blushed to think what these wildling girls thought of her, a southron woman who could tolerate only lemon cakes and watered wine when they could surely live on raw rabbits and rats for weeks.

“I didn’t think milord agreed with you much, but that doesn’t seem to be the case,” Grier said, face twisting into a sly smile under her hood. Sansa looked at her, confused. Grier tweaked her nose fondly and hauled her up from the floor. She wasn’t much older than Sansa, but she always seemed much wiser. Girls grew up more quickly on her side of the Wall, more quickly than even they did in the Red Keep or in war.

“Me and Marget, we had a wager about what you did in here with his grace when he came visiting. I could have sworn you just sit abed and read books. You’re so quiet. I’ve never known anyone to be so _still_. I’m a screamer. The lads always tell me that and Marget is worse.” She smirked.

 Sansa pinked. Grier had a lady’s manners, stiff and freshly learned, but she still had a wildling’s tongue. Or maybe that was just the tongue of a girl who knew more of men, more of the world. Randa had had that tongue.

Grier broke the ice on the water pitcher and poured a cup for her. The water was so cold it stung her tongue, but it washed the sour burn out of her mouth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sansa said.

Grier laughed. “Well, you blush prettily enough but I’d say you do know, at least well enough.”

Grier and Marget had tried to coax the details of the king’s nighttime visits out of her the first weeks of her marriage, even offering their own tales of fumbling in the woods behind their fathers’ keep and kissing boys with their seed coating their lips. Sansa had demurred as politely as she could manage. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed. Sometimes her mind strayed to that bed too, when the afternoons were long and her stitches crooked and heat between her legs a welcome change from the cold. But she knew the king would never want her to talk about such things, things so private they never discussed them themselves, so private she couldn’t even connect them to the man she saw during the day, outside of the furs and the dark. And anyway, he was so grim and severe about it all, his face shadowed and his mouth pulled taut when palmed her breasts through her shift and slid her hem over her thighs. Their coupling wasn’t anything to laugh about, not as Grier giggled about bedding the ice fisher and Marget japed about the size of all cocks she’d held in her hands and her mouth. Sansa couldn’t imagine her lord husband laughing about anything, much less _that_.

“The king is very attentive,” she said meekly. She should strike the girl for her gall, she thought vaguely. Cersei would strike the girl for speaking so brashly.

“You only have to be attentive once,” Grier said and, her hand quick as a rat, reached under the pelt to squeeze Sansa’s breast, twisting the nipple between her fingers.

Sansa cried out, pain blooming from Grier’s hand through her breast, and shoved the girl’s hand away. “What are you doing?”

“That hurt, didn’t it? And it hurt when milord squeezed them last night too, I bet. He wouldn’t have let them alone when they’re looking so much larger. Not even _that_ man could resist.”

Sansa blushed. Grier knew men and her lord husband was no more than a man under all that grimness and honor. He’d swallowed a groan when he touched her breasts through her shift last night, pupils blown wide, and even though it was cold, she’d tugged the shift off her shoulders and smiled when something like her name stuck in his throat. Her breasts hurt like a pressed bruise but she’d managed not to cry out when he weighed them softly in his hands, realizing that in all their couplings he’d never seen them like this, bare and candle-lit, the nipples darker than she remembered. She’d moaned when he thumbed one, more out of pleasure than pain, but he couldn’t tell the difference and jerked back just the same. He’d apologized then like a man shamed, shoulders slumped in self-loathing, and wouldn’t look at her until she’d pulled her shift back up to her neck.

“Eh?” Grier pinched Sansa’s breast again, gentler this time. She’d nearly forgotten the girl was there.

“Yes they hurt, but what of it? Everything hurts in this cold.” Sansa gathered up the stitching she’d abandoned yesterday, needing something to busy her hands with. She’d been sewing direwolves and stags along the border of a handkerchief, in stitches so sloppy Arya would have been ashamed. Her fingers were too clumsy and stiff for needle eyes and fine stitches now. As a habit she pricked each of her fingers with the needle in turn. All ten stung, little beads of blood swelling up from the punctures. At least the grey plague hadn’t stolen into Castle Black with the cold.

“And you haven’t bleed neither, have you?” Grier said sharply, grabbing Sansa’s chin and forcing her to look up. “Not this moon turn. We’ve been watching, Marget and Yve and me.”

Sansa swallowed hard and dropped her hands to her belly, startlingly cold even under all her wool and furs. “You don’t think…”

“I do. I have for a while. We just weren’t sure you’d want to hear it. We know how cold His Grace is. Yve thought you’d be upset.” She squeezed Sansa’s hand and smile sadly.

_He is cold, but he’s kind under all that ice._ The king wasn’t anything like the husband she dreamed of—a golden haired knight slipping out of song to pin flowers in her hair and cradle their lily-cheeked son in his arms. Stannis was prickly and grim, always grinding his teeth and biting out sharp words, and once she would have hated to marry him. But now he seemed enough—a man as good as Jon had insisted. And Sansa no longer had many romantic dreams about weddings and love matches. She’d married this king to give him an heir, to give him the North, much as she’d almost married another king. _At least this king is honest and just. At least this man isn’t cruel._

“His Grace is very kind. He has many worries. But I think he will be pleased.” _Please let him be pleased_.

“I’ve never seen that man pleased about anything but for this, aye, he just might be,” Grier said. “And you should be happy too. It’s a great honor to carry the heir to a kingdom—whatever this kingdom is.”

Sansa almost laughed at that. The king of this tower and of these men and a few more scattered across the North. The King of the Cold and little more.

“I am happy,” she said. “Even a king without a throne needs an heir.” The North might be lost but  she could give Stannis this, a son to love, if not an heir to place on the throne. It surprised her how much she _wanted_ to give him this.

“You’ll just have to think of a way to tell him. I can’t imagine that man comfortable about such talk. But come to bed now, please,” Grier pleaded, tugging her hand. “It’s early still and it seems even colder today, somehow. If you won’t sleep at least pretend so I can.”

“You go rest. I’ll be fine,” Sansa said and squeezed Grier’s hand. _We could be Kingsblood sisters, except that I’ve married a king._

Grier lit a fire and after she left Sansa dragged her black bear pelt to the hearthstone and sat so close to the flames her eyes stung at the smoke. _You won’t be mine,_ she thought, tucking her hand under her woolen shift to place her palm flat and bare against her middle. _Your father isn’t mine. Not really. You’ll belong to the Realm, to our cause. A Baratheon born here at the end of the world, in all this cold and death. It seems strange. But I know Winter and I can keep your warm for a while. And you’ll keep me safe._


	2. Blood Fever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is terribly self-indulgent. I blame an extensive headcanon of Stannis’s many repressed desires. I maintain that this is totally in character and that we just don't know it (yet).

II: Blood Fever

Stannis woke early, cramped and cold and _hard_. Hard, aching, and cursing, like he’d been every morning for a week. He’d been dreaming, he knew. He couldn’t remember of what but the itch had gotten under his skin and his cock was seeping like a boy’s. He gritted his teeth against it and tossed back the furs, letting the sobering shock of the cold do its work. It was cruel business, this duty of his. Since he’d been bedding his Stark wife he’d woken aching almost every morning, soft memories of red hair and smooth skin leaking away as soon as he opened his eyes but his blood running hot and unbearable until he found a begrudging release in his hands. He bit his lip and slid his hand to his groin. If he didn’t get this over with now he’d have to slip out of a council meeting later to spend guiltily onto the carpet in his solar and that shame was worse.

It hadn’t been like this with Selyse, always sniffling beneath him, her hands crabbed at his shoulders. It had been something like this with Melisandre, when he’d risen after with skin blistered and eyes boiled, like he’d sat too close to a fire. But Melisandre had been a trick, a glamour sent to make him break every vow and every right, even that of kinship. He wondered if she’d seduced Snow, now that she followed him like a trail of blood from a wound, now that she called _him_ the Warrior of Light.

That anger only made him harder, tangled up as it was in the fever dream of her body—her bare cunt, her fingers like hot wax. But it was the Stark girl who made him cry out, the weight of her breasts in his hands, the high whimper she made when he pushed into her. His response to her went beyond duty, beyond even the submission of a conned man.   _Gods, woman. What have you done to me? You’ve made me no better than Robert, still shaking with bloodlust a near a decade after his last war, leaving his kingdom to molder while he tumbled laundry maids and fathered bastards. You’ve made me act like a drunken fool, Sansa Stark, or a green boy just_ _learning to milk his cock_.

She put on a good show, that Stark girl, keening when he clumsily slid his fingers over her folds, rocking her hips up eagerly toward him. He would have thought she’d been trained in one of that whoremongerer Baelish’s brothels, but for the blood on the sheets the first night and the way her eyes had puddled with tears. Maybe she was just imagining someone else with her eyes rocked close and her cunt fairly seeping. She’d even asked him how she could please him, spidering her hand up to his groin and nipping at his laces, tugging her shift up over the red curls at her crotch—as if this was about his pleasure and not about giving his kingdom (his lost, frozen kingdom) an heir.

“You please me as much as you should,” he’d said and bundled her back up in furs almost without looking. “I don’t require any more from you.” In truth he had a hundred fetid, dizzy ideas about how she could please him, a hundred dreams hatched from he didn’t know where, but none of them were appropriate for a highborn lady and none of them the proper way to sire a king. He was sure she’d cringe if he told her, as Selyse did when he’d suggested she… ride him, when he’d only done so hoping his seed would take better root that way—or worse, she’d submit and resent him later, think him debased. _He_ thought himself debased for even imagining such things. He would not embarrass himself with lustfulness in the bed of a young woman who barely tolerated his presence, for all her feigned sighs and pretty whimpers.

He groaned and scrubbed at his eyes. He’d been in this frozen hell too long. He must be going mad. He was at loose ends here, a king without a realm or even a war. He still met with his men, of course, and they still plotted campaigns, battles that would have to wait until spring, or at least until the snows stopped falling so heavily.

Until the fear had gone out of his men’s eyes.

Until the stragglers stopped pouring in from the Eastwatch, wretched and grey-skinned, to be shot by the archers he’d posted on the road and burned from afar with flaming arrows…  

He took comfort in knowing that Shireen had died first, before the rest started to fall, before she knew what horror she had unleashed, and that she’d been buried properly, even up here in the ice. He’d been told that Selyse, already cragged and stone-tongued herself, hadn’t been able to set their daughter’s body alight as her faith determined and that comforted him too, to know his only child hadn’t left this world on the smoke of a mummer’s god’s fire.

That had comforted him for a time at least, until Snow had paled to hear of the unburned dead at Eastwatch and littered along the Wall nearly to Castle Black. Snow thought this grey plague was the Others’ work, spreading so virulently as it did from Shireen’s old greyscale infection, and feared a band of stone-skinned wights pouring into his garrisons. Snow had sent a band of men to Eastwatch and Greenguard and Long Barrow to burn the dead. How they set fire to bodies fully to stone was a mystery to Stannis—dragon fire itself had only melted the walls at Harrenhal—and a mystery it would stay. The dozen men Snow had sent to the Eastwatch and the other forts themselves returned mottled grey, their hands and cheeks already cragged, and Snow had ordered them shot through with arrows and burned a mile from Castle Black. He’d looked very much a boy when he was told of their approach, the stiff limbs and grey faces the scouts had spotted on the road, all the telltale signs of plague. He blamed himself, Stannis knew, but he’d steeled quickly and given the command for their deaths without flinching.

As for his own guilt, his own grief, Stannis couldn’t approach that. He’d loved Shireen in his own way—the daughter who should have been a son, a child too much like himself and her mother to be called fair, even before the greyscale crept into her crib.  He’d never known how to act around her, even when she’d first been placed in his arms, not the hoped for son but warmer and more alive than anything else Selyse’s womb had brought forth, and she’d stared up at him with his own blue eyes. It would have been better if she’d cried, if she’d fussed or none anything else but stare so unsettlingly. Such a queer, sad child, with so little knowledge of the terror she’d cause in death. Robert had liked the making of children well enough, but cared little for them after, he’d said once. _And I was much the same, although I cared not for their making either. Until now, until this cold and that red hair made me weak._

It must be the grief that was making his blood run like this, or more likely his sense of futility. He’d faced such a despair when he returned from the ruin of Blackwater Bay and only Melisandre had soothed him then—Melisandre with her flames and her promises and her blood-gorged leaches, the coppery spill of her hair and the creeping heat of her hands, leaving fingertip scorches on his chest and back. But it had been her visions, her whispered reassurances he’d wanted more than anything under her red skirts. Her comfort had been a farce though, a trick to lead him to the end of the world, and he feared Sansa Stark was playing a similar game with her pretty moans and her eager eyes, a game one no less dangerous because its only god was the one between her legs.


	3. Cold Comfort

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay. This involved way more effort than the quality would otherwise suggest.
> 
> This also has far too much plot for what's basically an elaborated "cuddling together for body heat sex" cliche. There's a whole subplot in this chapter operating along similar lines. Maybe it's a parallel. Maybe it's just fic and we don't get that fancy here. Small warning for some remembered dub con touching.
> 
> Nothing belongs to me but the shame.

III: Cold Comfort

Once Sansa thought she’d have golden haired babies, Baratheons who looked like Lannisters, high-cheeked and green-eyed and so beautiful they hurt to look at. She’d thought a lot about those babies when she first came to King’s Landing, when Joffrey was gallant and only a little wicked, when she couldn’t hear the cruelty in Cersei’s sweet words. She dreamt up Lannister names for them, never Baratheon, never Stark: Lann and Joanna and maybe Jonquil at the end. And once she’d wanted a Brandon and a Rickon and an Eddard called Ned, when she thought she’d marry Willas Tyrell, and maybe he would have let her honor her dead—Robb and her mother too by then. _I would have named one Arya_ _even_ _and they would have been beautiful, likw Loras and Margaery were beautiful, like my_ mother _was beautiful_.

This child would not be beautiful. She knew the stories of the Baratheon hair, inky black and marking every cradle—and how it betrayed Joffrey as sin-born and false. Stannis was not handsome, would not be handsome even if he wasn’t gaunt and grim and underfed. And Shireen had not been beautiful, would not have been beautiful even if the greyscale hadn’t crept into her crib and frozen her face, although maybe then Joffrey wouldn’t have japed about her so cruelly, calling her his gargoyle cousin with so much practiced pride Sansa knew it was a joke he’d stolen from someone else.

This child wouldn’t be a Ned or a Robb either. Fathers named sons, especially sons who would wear their crowns, and they named them from their own lines—and not for the brothers they despised. But still it would be a Stark, maybe more Stark than Baratheon because it would be born in this long Winter, in all this cold.

 _I_ _may die._ The thought was a cold knife between her ribs. _Women die birthing children all the time and it’s so cold here and we’re all so hungry and the grey death is so close._ The Wall didn’t even have a proper maester, just a man who knew how to stitch gashes shut and burn wounds that wouldn’t stop leaking closed, and that would hardly do her any good if the birthing fever took her. The Kingsblood girls swore they’d seen a dozen babes born, some deep in the wilderness, but they were as much summer children as herself. They couldn’t remember the last winter—and not even the greybeards among the wildings and in the Watch could remember a winter like this.

 _Who was the last queen to stay in the King’s Tower?_ Sansa wondered.  _Certainly she hadn’t borne a child here._ Suddenly it all seemed like foolishness—all the wars, all the kings, all the heirs. Nothing much mattered but the cold.

Melisandre had these chambers before and she had been something like a queen. She was everywhere in them still: in the smoke stain that yawned halfway up the wall behind the hearth and across the rushes, in the charred marks on the wooden slats of the floor and in the soot that lay like dust on the shutters and the table and clung to the curtains no matter how hard the Kingsblood girls beat them. Sansa would find her hands blackened as if frostbitten at the end of each day and sometimes Grier or Marget would have to lick their thumbs to rub fingerprints off her face.

Now the priestess had rooms in Hardin’s Tower and Sansa saw the light from her fires at night, bright gashes of blood from the window, spattered in reflection on the Wall. Fires were little use when the winds snapped and the frost fingered through the walls, but Melisandre wasn’t lighting those fires for warmth. She was lighting them to see.

The Queen’s Men swore the priestess saw the future in her flames, that once she’d seen Stannis’s victory, before he lost faith, as now she saw Jon’s. And the King’s Men, the ones who still kept the Faith of the Seven, cursed her under their breaths as the Red Cunt and spoke of how she’d led them to the end of the world to die. Stannis had answered the Night’s Watch’s desperate plea, the only lord in the realm to heed their calls, self-styled king or not, but his men blamed their misfortunes on her, even the cold. They also said, in whispers lower still, that she used to warm the king’s bed, that it was the scent of her bloody cunt that had dragged him to defeat at Blackwater and here to this frozen hell.

The men didn’t speak around Sansa, of course, but the Kingsblood girls had warmed enough beds themselves to hear all the gossip and grumbling at the Wall and spoke of it among themselves when they thought Sansa couldn’t hear. She tried not to listen when they whispered but the stories were too lurid, too unbelievable, she found herself straining after every word. The men said Stannis had bedded the Red Woman at Dragonstone and Storm’s End and the Wall; that she was the only one to sooth him after his defeat at Blackwater Bay, locked away with him for weeks in the Storm Drum.

Sansa could hardly believe it of him. She’d studied him at night sometimes, stretched beside her, stiff even in sleep. This man who gritted his teeth even as his heart sped and he hardened against his leg, this man who took his pleasure with grim determination and fell asleep in guilt—she couldn’t imagine _him_ coming to any woman’s bed except to make an heir. But the men had a story for that too, a story of a kind of son, so grotesque she could hardly look at Stannis and think of it.

Sansa had seen him in the company of the Red Woman only a few times—she trailed Jon so diligently now their meetings were inevitable—and then he’d ground his teeth so hard Sansa could hear his jaw creak and refused to look at either her or the priestess. And no one could say if he’d grown disillusioned with the Melisandre and her Red God because she’d failed to foresee the death of his daughter and the resulting plague or only because she’d turned from him to Jon. For all the Queen’s Men and King’s Men and Wildings and sworn brothers spoke of Melisandre, Stannis never said a word of her.

 _But she sat at this hearth and looked into fires on this grate._ The fire burned low in this cold, stunted and smoking, but Sansa had been sitting so close the fur on her cloak was singed. She edged closer, staring into the heart flickering above the ashes. _Tell me we won’t all die here._

The fire offered nothing but spitting ashes. She turned, eyes raw, and the flames followed her, patterned in green everywhere she looked. She rubbed her eyes furiously and wondered how Melisandre hadn’t blinded herself staring into flames for so long.

 _That woman is fire herself.  Such a thing wouldn’t hurt her_.

She would have no reassurance from the flames and her gods, new and old, weren’t in the business of revealing the future. She could only pray. But septs and weirwoods offered cold comfort and in this chill she only wanted a little warmth.  

Her eyes strayed to that bed again, the sheets she’d tousled ripping the furs from the bed. That bed would soon be as cold as everything else here at the Wall. Once she told Stannis of the babe she was sure he wouldn’t visit her bed again. She wouldn’t have thought when they first wed she’d ever regret his absence as she did now.

She wouldn’t tell him, not yet. She never saw him during the day and knew not to seek him out. She’d tell him tonight, when he stood his boots by the door and came to her looking resolute and miserable, when she held up the furs and let him slip close. And she wouldn’t think of how he’d react—if he’d be pleased like Grier said, if he’d smile, if he’d _leave_ their bed. She wouldn’t think of the words she’d use, how she’d start, not yet.

She’d find Jon. He would be steady and he would be warm, if in a different way.  

She stood stiffly, dropped her cloak off her shoulders, and tugged her shift over her head. She changed quickly, lacing up a woolen dress with shivering fingers and pulling on two pairs of thick stockings. She wore two shifts, a dress with fox fur at the collar, rabbit fur-lined gloves, and a black cloak with wolf fur at the neck, worn skin side out like the rangers did, like they all did now, and still she shivered.

But Jon would sit with her, quiet and warm in his own way, and never say a word about how distant she’d been at Winterfell or how much he’d wished it had been another sister bound for the wall on a half-dead horse.

\---- 

She found Jon in his rooms behind the cold forge, poring over a huge warped book and forgetting to eat. Ghost was sprawled before the flagging fire in his hearth and his eyes flickered to her when she entered, as bloody as his jaws and paws.

Jon looked tired but he scrambled to his feet when he saw her, blurring his surprise into courtesy—“Your Grace.” Stannis he was eager to defy, to refuse honors, to challenge, but he was always Your Grace-ing and bowing his head to her. It was easier to be queen and subject, even a Lord Commander, than it was to be Sansa Stark and Jon Snow.

“With Sam gone there’s no one to read the books,” he said, almost apologetic. “I thought they might be helpful.”

“And are they?” She dragged a chair from the corner to the table and sat. He’d abandoned a scrap of black bread and a cloudy soup reeking of horse beside his books. The smell made her gag but he didn’t notice, scrubbing his face with his burned hand.

“They might kindle a few fires,” he said. He saw her eying his untouched plate and groaned, suddenly a boy again. He snatched up the bread and tore into it with his teeth. “I know, I will eat. We’re lucky to have it. The Wall was never a Manderly feast, of course, but the food was better than this once.” He sank back down into his chair, chewing heavily, and clenched his burnt hand—a nervous tick, she’d noticed. The silences between them were still leaden and stiff, too crowded with things unsaid for either of them to let them linger. He spoke again quickly. “Are they feeding you well?”

“As well as they can. I don’t have much of an appetite either, I guess.” She drew her cloak tighter around her shoulders.

“What is it about horse that it smells the same cooked as it did living?” he said, smiling half-heartedly and reaching for his bowl wearily.

Had he always japed like this, she wondered, so dark and dry? She hadn’t known him well enough at Winterfell to tell. Arya would have known, Arya who snorted into her cups when he whispered in her ear at dinner, Arya who always tagged after him, who called him brother fully and never in halves. But Arya wasn’t here and Sansa didn’t know if he wanted her to laugh. He’d hugged her fiercely when his men had brought her to him shivering and snow-blind and she held him back just as tight, eyes prickling with tears. _But he wished I was Arya and I was imagining him Robb_.

She studied him closer. He looked even more like their father than he did when he’d left Winterfell—dark bearded, gaunt faced, taller than her by a head.  He _hurt_ to look at. He brought the bowl of soup to his mouth, his cloak shifting, and she saw them—a strand of red welts, circling his neck like the bruises of a stranglehold but raw and peeling, not eggplant purple and soft. They were burns like finger marks and there was another set, fainter and thumb-sized, on his cheeks. He saw her looking and tugged the cloak tighter around his neck, wiped the horse slime from his mouth.

“I’m sorry this isn’t the kingdom you expected. There’s no fine manners here,” he said. “Or the king,” he added sadly. He was guilty about giving her to Stannis, she knew, even though she’d been the one to accept, even though she reassured him it had been what she wanted. It wasn’t the truth, not quite, but at the Wall it was better to be the queen of a realm-less king than the maiden sister of the Lord Commander among a thousand men.

“His Grace is a good man,” she said and it wasn’t a lie. “He treats me kindly.”  

“He’s a better man than most,” Jon agreed.

Ghost rose then, loping to the door that led to Jon’s sleeping chambers and rubbed his muzzle against the gap where the wood was buckled and warped. The door opened and the Red Woman walked in, fiery hair swirling like her skirts, ruby pulsing at her throat like a tiny heart.

“Ghost,” she said, voice like bells, and the wolf burrowed his snout into her hands, nudging into her skirts. She scratched the scruff of his neck fondly.

Jon didn’t turn to look at her but he stiffened when she approached him, trailing her hand across the back of his neck, and swallowed hard when her fingers knotted in his hair. He looked glazed and guilty in the way Stannis did when he went boneless and moaned into her hair, and Sansa suddenly knew how he’d received those small, finger-shaped scorches.

 _Her touch must burn._ Sansa had stood near Melisandre only a few times, but the heat washing from her skin had been warmer than any fire she’d felt since coming to the Wall. She seemed to heat herself, following Jon through the snows in thin robes, head and hands bare, Ghost padding after her skirts.

And she always followed Jon now, like a red shadow sewn to his feet, winding her hands into the furs at his neck and pressing her mouth to his ear. Sansa shouldn’t be surprised to see her now. Jon was always stiff around her, mouth drawn taut, shaking her hands off coldly when his men were watching, when Stannis was watching. But he never sent her away and the men still talked, grumbling about their Lord Commander and that red bitch, speaking of her magic and her cunt half in envy and half in outrage. _Cersei once said a woman’s greatest weapon is between her legs._

Sansa looked at Jon now—the bulb in his throat jumping and his eyes sliding almost unwillingly to the woman beside him with her fingers twisted in his hair. She’d suspected this—the entire Wall suspected this—but now she _knew_. Jon might have had the flames of her god inked on his face like a priest. _Her_ flames inked on his face.

Everyone said bastard-blood ran hot. She knew: she’d been a bastard once herself and she’d moaned when Petyr slid his hand into her small clothes, his fingers so careful and merciless, and cried out against his mouth when she didn’t want to, tried not to. Even now that she was Sansa again, now that she was Queen, she still knew the thrum of that baseborn blood, knew it when Stannis touched her in the same way, clumsier and somehow kinder, knew it when he pressed his sweaty cheek to her neck and let his teeth still. But he’d freeze if she moaned, looking so tortured he must be ashamed of her, so she told herself she couldn’t moan, not ever. Her lord husband didn’t want her wanton and sighing like a trained whore, but you couldn’t ever leach out base blood. _Those who are born in sin and lust are made of sin and lust, even grave, dutiful Jon._

A prickle of heat on her face made Sansa look up, meeting Melisandre’s hot eyes. “I’ve seen you in my fires, Lady Sansa.” The voice was honeyed but the _lady_ was barbed, a sharp lance where a _queen_ should have been. _._

“Are you quite sure you’ve not mistaken her for another girl?” Jon’s voice was tight and his eyes edged uneasily to Sansa. “You seem to have difficulty telling my sisters apart.”

“I am just a vessel for the Lord of Light, Jon Snow. I see only what he shows me. But I know this sister. I’ve seen her, hair like a snuffed out candle, freezing in all this snow.” She was speaking to Jon but she wasn’t looking at him at all. Her red eyes were trained on Sansa, the ruby at her throat shone like a third.

 _She knows. She’s seen me. She’s seen this baby. She’s seen us dead. She wants to punish Stannis she wants_ _—_

“Do you see daggers in the night surrounding her as well? Will you protect her too as you protect me?” Jon’s voice was acid but his eyes strayed toward Melisandre almost unwillingly. 

 _He wants her,_ Sansa thought.  _He wants her even now and he hates her for it_. 

"Her folly is a different kind of folly than yours,” Melisandre said. She held a white hand out and Sansa took it almost without willing to. It was like grasping the wooden handles of a heated pot: her touch was prickling and warm and Sansa knew it would burn if she held on too long. “She has seen it too, even if she doesn’t believe in our god,” the priestess said.

Jon grimaced. “Would you have me place guards around my sister? It’s not the plague? We’ve taken so many precautions…” He looked between them uneasily.

Melisandre laughed, low and sweet. “It’s not the grey death. It's only a small business.”

She dropped Sansa’s hand and Sansa almost regretted the loss of her warmth. Her fingers were tinged pink and throbbing where Melisandre had twined her own with them. The priestess turned back to Jon and pressed her mouth to his ear, whispering like a low hum. His eyes rocked closed and he nodded, clenching and unclenching his burnt hand like always.

Melisandre patted Ghost on the head and walked out into the cold forge, skirts rippling and cracking like fire.

Jon watched her leave before he spoke but when he did he was steel again: “She’s been predicting my death for months now. You shouldn’t worry.”

“She sees truth,” Sansa said, looking down at the hands twined in her lap, still tingling. “I may die here.”

“We may all die here.” It was a cold comfort.

“This cold, it means something terrible doesn’t it? You know it. Stannis knows it, I think.”

Jon swallowed hard. “Melisandre does too. She believes Stannis was only a path leading her here to the Wall, a path to _me_. She thinks I’ll defeat them.” He laughed but it was hollow and hard. “I wish I could believe her.”

“Jon,” she started tentatively. _I must be bastard brave_. “The men say she nearly ruined Stannis, they say she possessed him, they say—“

“They say that I’m her thrall now. I hear them whispering. But she does have a power, Sansa. Maybe it’s just magic and trickery but she’s shown me things in her fires. I dreamt I wore armor of black ice and held a sword of fire. I dreamt I stood on the Wall and slew a hundred dead men as they climbed. I dreamt it and she showed me the same.”

“She showed Stannis the Iron Throne.”

“Do you doubt your husband?”

“No, but nothing has happened as _I_ once dreamed.”

Jon chewed on that slowly and Sansa gathered her courage. “Were you fighting alone?” she asked and she wanted her voice to be strong but it was small and high, a voice more fit for songs than talk of war.

Jon looked at her, puzzled. “I don’t know. I never stopped to look.” He slumped forward, burrowing his face into his hands, and the welts on his neck shone fierce and hot like a ring of candles. _This is the strain he never lets anyone see. No one but her._

“The things they say about her and me aren’t true,” he said finally.

“I hear no such things.” She matched his lie with her own. _I should say something but I’m not brave enough. I’m not._

But even with a belly full of courage she wouldn’t have the right to warn him. Not when she’d only loved him in halves at Winterfell, something meaner even than that,  and not when she’d smiled to see him sat among the lesser lords at feasts and thrown “bastard” in his face like a fistful of snow. And she certainly couldn’t tell him  not when her own blood ran bastard hot, not when she’d let Petyr touch her like that, too boneless too protest, not when her hips rocked against his hand so eagerly, even when bile clawed up in her throat. Not when Stannis looked at her the same way Jon looked at Melisandre, guilty and glazed, and not when he seemed so tortured, so shamed by his little wanton wife, half-bastard though he didn’t know it. And certainly not when that heat was sometimes the only thing she could think of it, when the hours ran like frozen streams, the Kingsblood girls could speak of nothing but men and their hands and their tongues, and her mind stuck like rusted metal on things queens weren’t ever supposed to think.

Jon was deflecting, speaking again but about provisioning the wildlings in the Gift, and she wanted to care, wanted to listen like a queen should, but she could only shiver and struggle not to look at the thumbprints on his cheek, bright as the badges on the queen’s men’s chest. Sometimes, she thought, turning to stone sounded pleasant. It certainly must be warmer than this, less fraught than this.

“Sansa?” He was calling to her, distantly, and when she pinched her palms they still stung like flesh. “What was Melisandre speaking to you about? She said you knew.”

“It’s nothing to fear. I know and I’m not afraid,” she heard herself say and this lie spilled like ice down to her stomach. But he still smiled— _he believes me_ —and she was happy to spare him another worry.

\--- 

Out in the yard the wind was harsh and howling, gusts like jaws snapping around her legs. She’d never intended to tell Jon, she realized as she stumbled over ridges of ice-toothed snow, struggling to fit her boots in the long-strode tracks a man left behind. She’d just wanted to sit in his company for a while, take some comfort in his steadiness, his calm command. She found him just as cold and broken as she was, groping for comfort in books and when that failed, in fire dreams, in fingers like coals at his neck and a red cloak like slash of blood on his bed. It would cost him his men. She didn’t need flames to see that.

_We’re all kindling dangerous fires here._

Her boots were soaked and her cloak dragging wet behind her by the time she reached the King’s Tower. She climbed the stairs wearily, her sodden clothes heavy like armor, and didn’t realize she’d passed her rooms until she stood on the landing a floor above, right at the door to Stannis’s.

She’d never been inside these rooms. He’d always come to her bed at night and if she’d never allowed herself to even consider seeking him out during the day. Even now the thought of knocking on his door made her heart dip and her skin run cold with sweat. She’d nearly turned to leave before she remembered he wouldn’t be there. Jon had left to speak with him about provisioning in the ice rooms beneath the Wall. His rooms would be empty.

Still she inched the door open cautiously and, finding the room cold and deserted, closed it quickly behind her. She was shaking, she realized, and nearly laughed at herself. She wasn’t afraid of Stannis. She was oddly fond of him, really, but he was careful to keep her at a distance and standing in his empty room, back pressed to the door, chest heaving, felt like a breach of propriety, an intrusion he wouldn’t like.

 His room looked much the same as hers—bed in one corner, as tilted and rotted as her own; shuttered windows shivering in the wind and sieving cold air through their cracks; a large fire place and a blackened grate, cold and dark now. She had thought her room bleak, with the patterns beaten out of the rushes and soot stains rearing like shadows up the walls, and her only decorations the small direwolf and clumsy stag a one of the Thenns had carved for Marget from a half-rotted log.  But his room was emptier still, the furs laid straight on the bed, the desk top bare and warped, its straight-backed chair standing sentinel by the fire.

But it _smelled_ of him—not something strong but something she could taste on the flat of her tongue, something that made her head swim. She nuzzled into the furs on his bed, into the pillow and there it was stronger there, stronger than it ever was on her own pillow in the morning, stronger even than it was between her legs, when she darted her fingers from her folds to her mouth before she bathed, hoping to taste him—

 She slipped her hand under the pillow and felt a small bunching of fabric tucked beneath it, crushed as if fisted when everything else on the bed was so neat and uncreased. She tugged the fabric out slowly and something sparked near her heart. She was holding her own smallclothes—a pair she hadn’t seen in weeks and hadn’t missed.

_He took them. He found them beneath the furs in our bed when we were through and when he left he took them and he kept them. He kept them here, under his pillow._

And she knew suddenly what he’d done with them. It was what Theon Greyjoy said he did with the smallclothes he’d stolen from a serving girl, what he whispered to Robb at dinner when he thought no one else could hear. She could hardly believe it of Stannis but here was proof. Proof that he didn’t find their couplings just a duty. Proof that he wanted her, even, in that feverish, half-conscious way she wanted him, wanted her enough to steal her smallclothes and keep them in his bed.

A worry itched but it was distant, a small nag about propriety, but she stood her boots by his bed, slid her soaked stockings off and shed her wet cloak and dress until she stood shivering in her shift. She was careful when she climbed onto his bed, careful only to tug up the top pelt, careful not to dent the pillows, and she curled up tight at the end, head toward the door, still cautious and a little unsure.

But maybe he wouldn’t mind her here and maybe he wouldn’t mind her wanton.


	4. Thaw

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Characterization was thorny for me with this and I can provide rationalizations for all my choices if necessary because I thought about it a lot (oh god).

IV: Thaw

Stannis had spoken to Snow in the icy storerooms carved below the Wall, as his red-jowled steward counted barrels of oats and stacks of frost-bitten apples. It was colder there than even outside and ice crept like blue-fingered vines across the crates and into the sacks. Many of the dangling hogs were a frozen to the entrails  and black with frost, swinging dark-faced like hanged men. Kings didn’t haggle over salted beef and ice-scorched pork, but here he was, like it was Storm’s End again and he was forced to ration out the cuts of horse—and then cat and then dog and then rat—to prevent the men from knifing each other over scraps. He’d been young then, not yet eight and ten, but Snow was younger still, little more than a boy, and at the Wall he had authority over Stannis himself. _He_ would divvy up the food as they starved here and there would be no onions to save them this time, only the meat they could scrape off the bones of their horses.

Melisandre wasn’t with Jon in the storerooms but the boy was anxious enough without her, tugging his cloak tighter around his neck and keeping his eyes just over Stannis’ shoulder. She was fucking him. That much was plain from the fingerprints singed at his throat. Her touch had always burned like sealing wax, when she had one hand at his neck in a throttle, thumb pushing into his mouth, and the other skimming lower, scalding hot ribbons down his chest. She held him so tight and so warm he’d be blistered to his balls in the morning, raw-eyed, unable to remember anything but that heat.

He shook his head to forget and Snow looked away, flushed redder than his burns. The priestess had only been the start of it, the start of the madness that dragged him to the Stark girl’s bed every night. He wondered if Snow knew what fires he was kindling. But he’d had a wildling wife, a girl he said was kissed by fire (he thought that _lucky)_ so perhaps he already knew the dangers of women and their heat.

The boy wasn’t so ashamed he couldn’t drive a hard bargain though. Snow was as close with his stores as he was with his words, Stannis thought sourly as he stalked up the ice steps afterward. He’d won but a few barrels of grain, not enough to feed his men. But the wildlings would be provisioned and that pained Bowen Marsh even more than feeding Stannis’ men. His scowl had pleased Stannis. Perhaps Snow wasn’t so blindly loyal to his ragtag band of rapers and fools as he seemed, Stannis thought with satisfaction.

Still, this is what his reign had become—squabbling with a boy commander over food like fishwives, relying on his generosity to feed his men. It was a bitter thought, as biting as the cold in the yard. It was dark already. The sun barely rose now. It stayed squashed and slippery like an uncooked egg on the horizon and seemed to slide away at the faintest wind.                

All this dark and cold and still he tried to produce an heir to this throne, the next king of this patch of ice and these thousand ragged men. Another soul to die in all this cold. It had been his _duty_ but now it all seemed like foolishness. Nothing much mattered but the cold and what it heralded. That would be their fight and in the cold of the Long Night there were no kings and certainly no infant princes.         

He’d been half-mad to marry the Stark girl, still clinging to some false hope that he could conquer the North, some hope Winterfell would matter, that a son would matter. He’d known for weeks how dire the situation was—the wildlings scrabbling at the gates of the Wall, speaking of untold horrors, of Others come out of legend in untold numbers to kill and raise the dead; the greyscale seeping out from East Watch and along every road; the frost blackening their meager supplies of food; the cold like knives. He _knew_ and still he came to his wife’s bed every night and still he spilled deep inside her, too dazed to manage anything but, as if they’d make a king and not just another mouth to feed or corpse to thrall. He was being reckless with Sansa, especially now that she was so pale and hungry, when she slept like a child with her hand tucked beneath her chin and her teeth chattering and he could never believe the stories they told of her escape from the Vale.

He wouldn’t come to Sansa tonight, he resolved as he unlatched the door to his rooms. He’d sworn as much before only to drag himself despairing and half-senseless to her door, too taut and aching to sleep. This time it would stick. He’d satisfy himself with his hand if he must, if he was weak, and never think of what a poor substitute it was for the wet heat of her, for her pretty moans and the sweet urging roll of her hips. It was for this purpose he’d stolen her smallclothes, slipping them from under the furs when she slept and leaving with them tucked in his pocket before he could lose his nerve to shame. That had been a particular weakness, a folly he could hardly believe of himself when he returned to icy emptiness of his own rooms, when the bunched silk and embroidered flowers looked so out of place in his hands, so _damning_. He’d stashed them under his pillow and told himself it was only because he couldn’t think of how to return them.

Those rooms were just as dark and chilled now and he fumbled blindly to light a candle. He scraped together a fire, low and smoking quickly through the wet wood and leaves, and he stood his sodden boots near the hearth and slung his cloak over the chair. These were tasks for a squire—kindling fires, knocking the ice and the muck off boots—but Devan had seemed so miserable lately, scrubbing his hands under his leaking nose and shaking like a soaked dog, and Stannis had let his duties slide. He told himself he didn’t want the boy snuffling snot over his clothes and his meals but truly he worried about him. Davos was probably beyond mourning another a son, but Stannis wouldn’t rob the man of five. The gods had never given him sons, but they’d entrusted enough sons of other men to him, most of whom he’d led to die. Those weren’t deaths to mourn but he’d be damned if he let another of Davos’ sons die under his watch, particularly of a sniveling cold. He’d sent the boy to bed and told him to return only when his nose stopped running, and for now he lit his own fires. Someone had left a plate on his desk though, knowing the soup would be cold no matter when he ate it, knowing he’d eat it anyway, and he gulped it down it hungrily. Meals of cat and boot leather had made anything tolerable and cold horsemeat a treat. Of all men he was perhaps most suited to this hell and if he believed in the gods, he would say it was some cruel irony on their part that he’d die this way. 

He’d torn into the bread and stretched his frozen legs before the fire when he heard the voice—soft, sleep-blurred, sliding over his name. _What in—_ He’d sent the guards away from his door weeks ago, sick of listening to them pound their feet and curse the cold through the door, but perhaps that had been unwise. He rose slowly and reached for the sword he’d placed on the table—his Lightbringer, gone dark but still good steel. The light from the fire was weak and orange: its ripples didn’t reach the bed and shadows were burred and heavy in the corners. _Shadows are the servants of the Lord of Light._

Blood ticked hot in his ears and he drew the blade. He may be a savior burned out but the swordstill caught the light, the low burn of the hearth kindling red flames on its edge, and he could think of nothing but how perfect it would be to kill her with light on his side. Azor Ahai indeed. He swung a candle at the bed, needing to see her scared and spattered and begging him, begging him not to burn her through the heart and let all her shadows spill out and fizzle—

 _Sansa_. It was Sansa and she was weeping and pleading, and he hardly heard her over the rush in his ears. She was cowered on the bed, bundled in his furs, hair wild with sleep, and she was saying his name again and it was hushed and frantic but it was his _name_.

“What are you doing here?” It was a challenge though he didn’t mean it to be.

Lightbringer had gone dark again, its flames sputtered down to bare steel, but her eyes still darted after it, wide and unblinking. He tossed it aside, winced when it clattered against stone. _Good steel…_

She quailed and crept back further on the bed. She was crying but she was trying not to show it, blinking hard and biting her lips white. Even crushed back he couldn’t stand a woman’s tears. They reminded him only of Selyse, crying violently and throwing herself at his feet, babbling about her god and their dead children as if hysterics would sway him. Crying, the Stark girl was everything he’d feared she'd be—silly and dramatic and young, so very young—and watching her huddle there on his bed made anger tighten at his throat like a stranglehold. Funny, that didn’t seem to douse the arousal that had been cooking under his skin since he found her there, since _before_ he found her there, when he thought it was another and he’d kill her—

“I won’t hurt you.” It came out harsh and far-fetched and he felt a surge of guilt like bile. He wouldn’t hurt her, damn it. He just wanted her to stop crying.

Incredibly she seemed to believe him. “I know.” She hung her head like a chastened child and fiddled with the ragged edge of the pelt. “I was waiting for you.” She shrugged.  “I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I—I’d hoped you’d be pleased to see me.”

She lied prettily. He wondered what she wanted. A ship to the south, a warmer cloak, some stupid trinket or declaration of love? Maybe she’d ask him to burn idols, if only to keep her warm. He’d do it too, he realized with a chill, even if he’d hate her for it. “Out with it,” he gritted. “You obviously want something and I won’t have you make a fool of us both trying to trick it out of me.”

Her face crumpled. “What are you talking about? I—I don’t want anything. I didn’t come here to _trick_ you.” She was little more than whispering.

“Women always want something. If they’re not crying for it they’re pulling up their skirts and fucking for it. You do that well enough. I won’t be moved by tears.” He watched his words fall, waiting for her to weep again, to deny it even as she sniffled and sobbed. But her jaw just tightened and her eyes burned. She rose from the bed, slipping out of the furs. She was dressed in nothing but her shift, he realized, her nipples peaked in the cold beneath it, and he tore his fingernails into his palm to stop the catch in his breath. His bed would smell of her later, as sharp and sweet as the smallclothes under his pillow had once been, before the smell of his own sweat had seeped through them. He tried not to think of all the times he’d conjured her there, hair unfurled across his pillow, dressed in nothing so much as a shift and sliding on top of him, bolder than she’d ever been in truth, pinning his to the bed with her eyes and her hand on his chest and sometimes at his throat—

She was shivering and her eyes uncertain but she stood steady in front of him, her chin pushed up to look at him square. “I’ll leave then, if it pleases you. Unless you’d like me to pull up my skirts and _fuck_ for it.” She spat his words back at him.

“That won’t be necessary. It won’t be necessary again, in fact.” He gritted it through clenched teeth, _made_ himself say it. “You’re relieved of your duties. This place doesn’t need an heir.”

“Then you don’t need _a wife_.” She snatched up her dress and pulled it over her head. Her hands fumbled with the laces, clumsy with anger and cold, and she yanked on her stockings so hard he thought he heard the wool stretch and whine. He watched dumbly as she found her boots—leaking a puddle onto the rushes he’d have to have cleaned—and shoved her feet in them, turned to leave. She was only halfway to the door when she spun back

“Stannis.” This time his name was sharp and spiked on her tongue, a challenge. She fumbled beneath her skirts, wriggling and tugging at something, hitching up her knees. 

She pulled her smallclothes over her boots and held them out to him, crumpled in her fist. “You might want these then,” she said, as easily as if she were offering him her favor.

His eyes darted to the pillow he’d buried the smallclothes under and his throat clenched so he could hardly speak.

“I wonder, what’s the punishment for theft in your realm, Your Grace?” she said. His breath was ragged, his heart thudding against his throat, and she _knew_. She saw him sweat and swallow hard and she smiled, small and sly.

“I won’t have a wife of mine speak to me in such a way,” he said, half a growl. He grabbed her wrist, squeezing so the fist around her smallclothes went slack and bloodless. Her eyes widened but she didn’t back down.

“I won’t have a husband of mine steal from me,” she hissed. She grabbed the bundle from her trapped hand and crushed it against his chest, flattened her palm against his hammering heart. “You want me. I’m going to damn you with how much you want me,” she said, fierce but quavering a little. He shoved her hand away, rougher than he intended, and she backed away like she’d baited a bear. They stared at each other. “You could have just asked,” she said softly.

He snorted. Ask and let her know how much he wanted her, let her know how she’d weaseled under his skin so deeply he pleasured himself just to the scent of her and how he couldn’t sleep if he hadn’t fucked her he was strung too tense and too aroused, and he couldn’t sleep after he’d had her either, running it through again in his mind until he was as hard as he’d ever been and that wasn’t him, that was Robert or even Renly but not him, never him...

“Ask you for your _smallclothes_ and let you mock me behind my back as you mock me now to my face?” he said finally.

“I’m not mocking you.”

“The whole realm is mocking me.” He was near snarling but she didn’t flinch.

“The whole realm is too cold and miserable to even spare you a thought.”

He huffed. Whoever had taught her to lie and moan so prettily had surely also taught her insolence. “I warned you not to speak to me thus.”

“I’d only tell you truths.” For all her bold words she wasn’t so brave. She was shaking, wide-eyed and cringed when he raised his hand to scrub at his bare head, to fumble at the emptiness where a crown should be. He’d had his wretched fire-tongue crown melted down for scraps—the handle of a knife, a plate to mend a gardbrace—and there hadn’t been the metal to make another. And he hardly felt a king at all, lording over no one but a pack of wildlings and his scared, impertinent little bride.

“I won’t strike you, girl, if that’s what you think.”

“No.” She curled her arms around her shoulders, hugged herself tight. “You won’t touch me at all.”

“You should be relieved I don’t take what’s mine. I could have you now and you couldn’t deny me.” _An empty threat_. He turned away. He wouldn’t let himself look. His by rights, all that amber hair and that pink mouth and the warm rise of her breasts and all things he didn’t know how to describe. His by rights and just as faraway and impossible as his throne. He sat in the chair by the fire.

“Why don’t you?”

He spoke to the hearth. “Because you’d lie as hard as you always do and whimper and moan like a painted whore and I won’t be mocked. I won’t have it anymore. I’d have you lie beneath me stiff and bored and squeeze your eyes shut and count the seconds before I’d have you put on another show to flatter me.” Selyse always lay with him true, miserable and lock-jawed and quiet, and if it had been difficult to raise his blood—if to finish he had to close his eyes and remember the whores Robert had left in his bed on his sixteenth name day, the ones who’d already stripped bare and pinched their nipples hard before he found them and sent them away in red-faced horror—it had been honest at least.

“You think me so duplicitous?”

“You spent years in that cesspool in King’s Landing under my brother’s queen and years with that damnable whoremongerer in the Vale. ‘Duplicitous’ is being kind.”

“You know what happened to Littlefinger,” she said.

The men whispered that she’d killed Baelish, slid a knife into his neck while he fumbled beneath her skirts and left him to soak the mattress in his Gulltown brothel in his own blood, but she’d never spoken of it to him and he never asked. He didn’t care for lurid stories. And he’d wanted to think her untouched and innocent, as Jon had sworn she was, as the blood on the sheets and her thighs the first night testified she had been. There were tricks with vials of ox blood and the skins of cow livers, he knew. He knew men paid highly in Baelish’s brothels for the illusion of bedding a virgin and that Littlefinger sold too many maidens for them all to be pure. But for as little as Stannis knew of women, he knew when they were lying and he knew the way a maidenhead tore. Sansa Stark had been a maid when he came to her bed, although that had been the only truth she’d told there. (Or as much a maid as a girl could be if she’d been taught to croon and sigh by Westeros’ finest dealer in flesh.)

“You know what happened to him,” she repeated now.

He rounded on her. “Should I just wait then and let you slip a knife into my throat as you did him?”

She flushed, curled in on herself further. “He had no right.”

“But I do.”

She nodded and ran her hand under her leaking nose.

“Rights don’t mean you truly have a thing. That’s the truth of it.” He could hardly fit his words through his clenched teeth. “The throne was mine. Storm’s End was mine. And here I sit with neither and a girl bride who flinches from me when she’s not flattering me with falsehoods.”

“Please, my lord, I do not lie to you.” She edged closer and darted her hand out to rest on his arm. “I do not pretend,” she said, mumbling and pink to her neck. “I –I think of you during the day and then—then I can’t sit still and all my stitches come out crooked…” She trailed off hopelessly.

He pushed her hand away. “Who put you up to this? You’ll tell me. Was it her? Is fucking your brother not enough for her that she has to reach me too?” He was shaking her shoulders though he didn’t remember standing to grab her.

“I’m not her,” she sobbed. He let her go and she heaved, crying freely now. “And I can’t tell if you hate me for that or not.”

He stared at her, sniffling and mopping her tears with the backs of her hands.

 He kicked the chair toward her. “Sit.” 


	5. Kindling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bet you never thought you'd see more of this. 
> 
> People take things way too seriously. This is basically dub-con, apocalyptic, fuck-or-freeze, age difference, shame kink smut (that also explores complex layers of consent and duty and power differentials, as one does) and idgaf what you think. And yeah, it’s still burning so slow I’m not even sure the oven’s on. I better check that. (The middle does wander, admittedly, but I wrote it years ago and I can't be bothered to change it.)

V: Kindling

The cold settled into the space between them, unrolling with darkness, and although Stannis prodded and fed the fire, it flickered and fell. It was straggle of light, giving no heat, but he kept poking at it, churning through the ash to find blue pockets of warmth, striking flint against steel—again and again. The sparks he scraped faded as quickly as they fell, and the rasp of it set her teeth on edge. There was a burst of wind, funneled as it spilled down the chimney. It threw soot back at Stannis, blackening his hands, and tearing open the shutters. Now the cold surged in, a glacial tide where before there had only been bony fingers, frosted curls like smoke. Stannis hardly looked up. 

Soon she was shivering—bones rattling in the familiar, sore way, teeth dancing in her mouth. She wanted to leave, but her joints had iced. She was afraid to make a sound, humiliated by her own display and his anger and disgust. Her mouth soured to remember it: pinning her smallclothes to his chest, talking of marital rights and lust and the priestess while he scowled and fought her off. She watched her husband, dulling steel trying to build a fire, and the rattle of her jaw sounded like thunder. 

When she was younger, she’d lie beneath her furs and map the new curves of her body and wonder how they’d please a man. She never would have thought you could take that man to bed and have him remain a stranger. She didn’t know this husband who crouched before the hearth, although they had lain together in the single-minded pursuit of a son all the nights of three months. It was dark in his room now, the only light a trickle from the fire and a weak wash from the moon, and she tucked her hands against her stomach, reassured that he couldn’t see even if he turned. They weren’t close enough for secrets, even if this one was half his. 

Finally, the clatter of her teeth thawed him, or at least unstuck him from his sad fire. He seemed surprised to find her still in his rooms, even a little guilty, she thought. He muttered something about freezing his wife to death and dragged a heavy fur from the bed, dropped it at her feet, almost without looking. It was a bear pelt, worn down to tufts and leathered skin, and she found little warmth under it. 

“Thank you, my lord.” 

Stannis shrugged. He moved to close the shutters, now knocking against the walls with each new breaker of cold. But something stilled his hands on the clasps, beat the breath out him.

Riders on the western road, wights, a raiding party, Lannisters, Petyr, she thought, the old tide of fear, tugging her under again. She scrambled to the window, dragging the pelt. 

It was just the familiar slash of light from Hadrin’s Tower, glinting like a trapped star. Stannis stood as if pinned by it, stitched through the heart with a red thread, strung across the gulley of the dark to him. Sansa had seen the light from her bed before, after Stannis left and her own fire had dwindled to blue coals. That light could spill through the smallest rifts in her shutters, running like water through all the crannies the cold found. She’d lie there, unsated and shivering, and imagine Melisandre and Jon, in a ring of heat like a candle glare, naked and undisturbed by the cold. Since she’d been a bastard her thoughts always ran this way, to stretches of bare skin and the hot seals of mouths, quickened breaths. It brought a kind of warmth at least, a kindling below her stomach—or a scalding in her ears. 

Stannis too seemed to strain towards that splash of light, as if its heat could pour into his rooms, running across that cold crevasse to warm their cheeks, the faraway nubs of their fingers and toes. 

“I don’t know how she lights those fires. She must have some magic.” He turned back to the weeds of his fire, kicked the cooling grate. 

“She’s bewitched Jon,” Sansa said. “He seems miserable about it.” Miserable and contented, she added silently. Sansa had seen her brother creeping back from Hadrin’s Tower, slick-eyed and drowsy, and envied him that mindlessness, that heat. She’d known it once too, with Petyr’s head sunk between her legs, and sometimes she found it here, with her hands tucked beneath the furs—that narrow purpose, that itch, and its scratch like a rebirth. There would be a sting of shame, but it would come later, once that weight dripped from your limbs and that blankness faded and let the clutter and pain of living roar back. She envied Jon those moments of joy, however stolen, or poisoned. Sometimes, after Stannis spent inside her, she wanted to cling to him, make a fool of herself begging him to stay, touch her, keep her warm. 

As if reading her thoughts, Stannis laughed, a sound like it had been dragged from him. “Melisandre has used no spells for that. She hasn’t done anything that you don’t do yourself.” 

He meant to tar her, lump her with witches and whores. Women whom, if she were honest, she envied: women with power, women not caught adrift in a brutal world, vulnerable to the machinations, the whims and the pleasures of one man and then another. 

The men here said Melisandre could drive a man mad, with spells, with the future she unknotted for them, spun out in cryptic whispers with her red mouth pressed to their cheeks. The Kingsblood sisters told her of the men who followed the priestess slavishly, hungry for a settled future, a brush of her skirts against their feet, a wash of her warmth. There were Wildlings who’d become sudden devotees of her god; men who’d swore to never bend the knee to a king now groveled after a woman and her smoke-and-mirrors deity, seeking solace and pleasure before the world iced into nothing. She’d lured Stannis, to her bed and to the frozen rim of the world, and he was reputedly the soberest man in Westeros, a man with no appetites, no weaknesses for her to catch her hooks into. The man least predisposed to fanaticism, to pleasure, and he fell. 

Sansa had no similar powers, not of sorcery and certainly not of sex. She was not Melisandre and she was not Cersei, luring men like a siren, with songs of power and the wetness between her legs. She wasn’t those women, but she’d often wished she were, when she was tugged here and there by men, when all her fantasies of control, of crowns, or revenge or just safety, were, stupidly, routed through them. She’d wanted to be a queen and she’d wanted the love of a gilt-haired prince and all his subjects so she’d flattened herself at his feet, betrayed her family for him, accepted his mockery and violence. And when she’d wanted refuge, she’d thrown her lot in with another man, one who murmured his schemes into her upper thighs, his plan to place her on the throne, and made her thrash and cry out with his plots as much as with his tongue. She was always the one puppeteered, the one led astray, poisoned by the heat of her own blood.

There was a rumour she’d murdered Petyr, gutted him in his sleep in a Gulltown inn and then left his blood to soak through the mattress, dribble down through the floorboards into the pub below, so he was discovered, white and stiff, the next morning. She’d let that story ferment because it made men fear her and because it was a pleasing rewriting of her past, one that made her seem stronger, less vulnerable to promises, to heat of another person’s flesh. 

She had little sway over Stannis. He may have secreted her smallclothes under his pillow, but he always took her grimacing--beneath drifts of furs, fumbling to tug down her stockings and hitch up her skirts, not looking, hardly even feeling. They coupled in strained silence, through layers of wool and leather and fur, their faces trained in denial of what their bodies did. She knew it wasn’t only the cold that made him bury the act, perform his duties with his eyes fixed on the headboard, like they were something repulsive, shameful that couldn’t be brought into the light. And when she moaned—without meaning to, with her teeth tearing into her lips not to—he tightened his face like a man disgusted. If he wanted her he did so grudgingly, resentfully, his desire making her enemy and never lover. 

She wanted to challenge him, make him explain how she was like these women, when he flinched from her touch and cursed and denied the ache between them, the small half pleasure their bodies won while their minds scolded against them. How she was like Melisandre, and Cersei, when she found herself again and again malleable to others, always feeble, to compliments and pledges, and the touch of someone’s hands. She was loyal to Stannis already, in a way that sickened her, when he had given her little cause to be, given her nothing but ritualized marriage vows, and a ritualized bedding, begrudging and only for legitimacy and reproduction, he was quick to remind her. She wanted to challenge him, make him explain how she could be a doxy, a conjurer, when she was so weak-willed and unwanted. But her earlier courage seemed brash, wanton, confirmation of Stannis’ worst suspicions of her. She spoke quietly now.

“What do you accuse me of? I’m not a whore or a witch. I cannot control men. I am always their plaything and their pawn,” she said. She pinched her palms to keep from weeping. Stannnis thought of tears as tricks, akin to a spell or a prostitute’s flattery. She mustn’t cry. 

He looked stonily at her and finally turned to close to shutters against Melisandre’s light. “You should leave, Sansa.” He used her name so rarely it was uncertain on his tongue. It sounded now as a weary reproach, one that chewed at her, raised her hackles and shamed her all at once. Their marriage was a farce, a dynastic match in an apocalypse, but she couldn’t give up on it. There was no portent or even urgency to these end-days: they were whittled away in mundanities, in a scramble for small comforts. If they were to freeze to death, she would right this relationship with Stannis. 

He seemed as immobile as the Wall, resistant to every charm she’d ever learned—from her septa, from Petyr, from Myranda. But she could unspin one lie, one falsehood she’d stoked and tended like a fire over the last months, and warmed herself on, TO beat back her grief and shame about Petyr. It had been a comfort, to look over the destruction of her life, and splice into it an act of strength, a moment when she was anything but spineless and frail, led by her careless heart. 

“I didn’t kill Petyr Baelish, if that’s what you think,” she said.

“I never accused you.” Stannis’ face was trained to blankness.

“But you’ve heard the stories. Maybe that’s why you think me so false. I didn’t kill him; I didn’t need to. He had many enemies.” Softer: “I couldn’t have. I found him dead in his rooms and I wept over him. He’d been my safety.”

Finally she’d moved him: he began to pace before the hearth and she could hear the crushing of his teeth. “Great safety,” he said. “Hiding you in one of his brothels? Teaching you his schemes?” 

“I was a maid. You ought to know enough of women to know that,” she said.

“You can swear he never touched you?” 

“There are other ways to please a woman, Your Grace.” She hated the words spilling from her mouth, their impudence and spite. The bastard in her speaking, Littlefinger’s plaything. 

“Tricks I clearly don’t know,” he said and wheeled to the grate again. He sunk the fire iron again into the ash. “Damned thing.”

So she was wanton and spoiled; disgusting to her husband; he even couldn’t bear to look at her. Sansa sobbed, tearless and desperate, rubbing at her mouth with the edge of the bearskin. “He touched me and I liked it and I was ashamed. I’m flesh, and I’m sorry for it,” she said. 

Stannis turned and regarded her carefully. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t weep. I know how you hate it.” 

He stepped to her, loomed over her, and she shrank, startled. But he just hitched the bear pelt over her shoulder again. 

“Did he force him on you?” he asked. His mouth was tight, the words cut sharp on his teeth. 

She met his gaze and shook her head. “No, not exactly. I just—I never stopped him. I was afraid to, at first, and then—He was my safety.“ She drew a shaky breath. “I disgust you.”

“I’m not a hypocrite.” He scuffed at a remaining chink of red light on the floor and exhaled like he was releasing a long-held breath. He spoke to the floor and she had to strain to hear him over the whine of the wind. 

“I told myself it was magic, a potion, something she’d slipped into my drink. She keeps these bottles, sewn into her sleeve. I’ve seen her do it. But it was just a weakness. She’d tell me what I wanted to hear: I was chosen, we’d win in spite of everything. She’d come to me…” He trailed off. “In the end I’m no better than Robert, or Renly.” 

“No better or worse than any man, in that way,” Sansa dipped her head, rested it against his chest. He flinched but didn’t draw back. “But you have been kinder to me than any man. You have not mistreated me or forced yourself upon me."

“I am not the husband you imagined.” 

“I used to imagine very stupid things.” 

“I’ve even haven’t been able to provide for your safety, or warmth.” 

“You’ve warmed my bed,” Sansa said, into his jerkin. 

“That was duty,” he said. “And folly.” 

“It was nice.” She heard her own voice and hated it: high and dumb and plaintive. 

“Nice?” he said, mocking and incredulous. “You may pretend well, but not there’s a limit even to your theatrics. You don’t think it’s nice. Not truly.” 

She looked up, startled, probably flushed. He read her alarm as guilt. “You think me so naïve of women,” he said, “that I don’t know when they truly enjoy—that.” He waved his hands toward the bed, its heaps of fur. He settled on “duty.” When women enjoy their duty. 

“I do enjoy it—I,” she said. 

He was grinding his teeth now—jaw clamped, mouth drawn, and eyes burning. “I know what you think: Stannis Baratheon has never made a woman peak so he doesn’t even know one should. Or maybe Littlefinger never taught you that lesson. Seems he didn’t have to teach you. You told me all about how he pleased you.” 

“Maybe if you would just stay and not roll away and rush off—“ she said. “Maybe if you would speak to me and stroke my hair and—“ She was nearly sobbing again. “Maybe if you didn’t just think of it as duty--” 

Her voice faded, and they stared at each other. It must still be cold, she thought, but I haven’t felt it. 

Finally, he spoke, shifting in his furs, scrubbing at his chin, its half-grown beard. “I don’t think of it as duty. Duty would be twice a month, when your maester said was best. And duty is meaningless here,” he said. “It was just that weakness.” He bent his head, defeated. Her hands twitched to reach out to him, cusp his face. He was haggard, gaunt and bloodless with cold and hunger, his beard coming in grey. But there was something in his sinewy strength, the way his grimace loosened when he was inside her, how warm he was over her--

There: that itch again; that low, pooling heat. Sansa inched toward him, placed her hand on his chest. She could feel his heart thrum, even through leather and fur. “I’m weak too then,” she said. 

She squirmed, and he caught her face in his hand, titled her head so she looked at him. He stroked his thumb across her cheek, and she realized she was trembling. 

“Come to bed,” she whispered, and he nodded, almost grimly. He pulled her to him. She could feel the roughness of his jerkin, the bristles of his furs, and beneath, how he shook. How hard he was against her belly. He clutched at her like he wouldn’t let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More coming shortly, I hope.


End file.
